The folks over at YWAM AfriCom did an interview recently with Tom Bloomer about how important communication teams are to the ministry of Youth With A Mission (YWAM).

I love his quote about YWAM Communication Teams following the YWAMers around and “bothering them” until we get their stories to publish so that others can get involved and be released in to missions. The idea of “bothering them” is certainly something that I feel like I’m doing constantly to get stories for the YWAM Podcast, and to gather news for YWAM.org and the YWAM Life web-site.

We need more YWAM Staff and Students to be telling their stories! As Tom says, there is so much happening out there that is under the radar that we need people to be involved with. You can read more about my thoughts about telling us your news in my article, Tell Me Your Story.

If you don’t know how or where to start with telling your story please contact me, and I can help you get set-up with easy ways for you to tell your story.

It was highlighted to me recently by an unfortunate incident how important it is to know exactly how private you are on Facebook. Facebook has a habit of setting their default settings to best serve their advertisers, rather than their users. It pays to remember that Facebook is a commercial entity, with a goal to make money.

I know that many in YWAM, or missions in general, do not want the entire world to be privy to their personal information, thoughts and photos. While Facebook is a great way to connect with only the people you want to connect with, you need to do so carefully.

Below is an image of my privacy settings, with you get to by clicking on “Account / Privacy Settings” in the top right corner of Facebook. I keep it so that only friends can see anything about me as I have control of who I friend, but not who my friends are friends with…

If you set it up like that then you are part way there, but you also have to be very aware of what organisations or companies you “like” and what applications you load. Liking fan pages or loading applications gives them access to all sorts of information about you that you would probably rather they didn’t know.

Probably the most comprehensive guide that I have found recently about Facebook privacy and security is the ZDNet article “The Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide”. If you are at all concerned about your personal privacy and security, and are on Facebook, then I consider it a must read article.

Of course the best way for you to protect your privacy is to simply stay off Facebook, but I don’t know many people who would want to do that …

One of the things that we are always trying to do in Youth With A Mission is improve our ability to communicate what is happening in the mission. That is one of the reasons why I produce the YWAM Podcast, set-up YWAM Information Technology, my YWAM News web-site and why I work on many of the other projects I work with around the world.

Despite the proliferation of Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels most people still do most of their on-line communications using e-mail. From people and organisations that I am really interested in following I will usually look for a way to sign up for e-mail newsletters if I’m given the option.

With that in mind I’ve set-up a way for people to subscribe to receive an e-mail every time that news is added to the YWAM International Web-Site. You just need to put your e-mail address into the form on the left and hit submit. You will then be sent a confirmation e-mail and after confirming your e-mail address any time there is a news story added to the YWAM Interational web-site you will be sent the article via e-mail.

At the moment there are only three subscribers to this service, so I’m curious to see if it is something people are interested in and if it is a viable communications channel to add to our ways of connecting people to the mission.